Chapter Fourteen progresses

With heroic effort I’ve managed to add another 1,500 words to what I’ve written for Chapter 14 of The Sleep of Reason. (I’m still suffering from that head cold.) I’m now up to just over 4,000 words, and the key development of the chapter has taken place. All that remains is the mopping up, finishing the immediate consequences of that key development. (The longer term consequences of the development are what the rest of the novel is about.)

I’ve noticed that my chapters are getting shorter. Some are half the size of the earlier chapters. I’m not sure how to account for this. I tell myself that I simply write what the story calls for and that I don’t write to a particular word count goal. Maybe that’s true. And maybe the events that are taking place in the story are now happening so quickly that my narrative method has come to mirror them with shorter chapters. Or further maybe, I am getting impatient with getting the novel finished, so I’m unwittingly writing shorter chapters to make that happen. And if I look at it from another perspective, maybe my earlier chapters are flabby and need trimming.

Regardless, I creep forward with this weird tale, so unlike anything I’ve ever written and yet also unlike in its motivation to get written. I’m not sure what I’ll take up next, but I have a feeling it will be unlike anything I have done before and possible different from anything I had planned to do.